I think it can be coherently argued that the principle problem of philosophy is precisely learning to perceive truly. This does not only apply to the hypothetical tree, apple, or coffee cup which is the perennial stand-in for ‘the world’. If you go back to the beginning of philosophy (with Parmenides and the Eleatics) the understanding of how things can come to be as they are is the fundamental question. I *think* this is what Heidegger was attempting to revive with his question of ‘the meaning of being’.

Anglo philosophy is now as Banno pointed out overwhelmingly realist (and I would add naturalistic) in orientation. It starts with the assumption of ‘the reality of the tree/apple/coffee cup’ and then tries to work backward from that assumption without ever really calling it into question. Whereas what is generally categorised as idealist philosophy and also phenomenology, does call the ‘normal attitude’ into question. — Wayfarer

I have two modes that I haven’t quite been able to reconcile. One is my Anglo mode, in which I’m a plain-speaking direct realist, and the other is my sort of phenomenological, sort of Marxian, quite traditional, wannabe Hegelian mode, in which philosophy has ambitions as grand as you’ve set out here. From the latter point of view, Wittgenstein’s statement that philosophy “leaves everything as it is” is an abomination.

That “the principle problem of philosophy is precisely learning to perceive truly”, in a wider sense than is meant in this here discussion, sounds good to me. I think you’d really appreciate Horkheimer’s Eclipse of Reason, which I’m reading now. He has a notion of “objective reason”, which aims at universal truths and might line up with your own conception of philosophy.

Great philosophical systems, such as those of Plato and Aristotle, scholasticism, and German idealism were founded on an objective theory of reason. It aimed at evolving a comprehensive system, or hierarchy, of all beings, including man and his aims. The degree of reasonableness of a man’s life could be determined according to its harmony with this totality. Its objective structure, and not just man and his purposes, was to be the measuring rod for individual thoughts and actions. This concept of reason never precluded subjective reason, but regarded the latter as only a partial, limited expression of a universal rationality from which criteria for all things and beings were derived. — Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason

It’s not just me who thinks so by the way. The view is set out nicely in Possible Experience: Understanding Kant's Critique of Pure Reason by Arthur Collins.

That is what is most objectionable — hypericin

I’ll tell you what I think is most objectionable. It’s when people are explicitly and politely told that what they are attacking is a position that nobody holds, and they ignore the information completely. Or when someone helpfully cites the philosophical literature and sets out the state of philosophical debate on the issue, and likewise is ignored.

Direct/indirect realism is like grammar controversies: it attracts those who are sure of themselves but at the same time unwilling to do the most basic research.

Do we not, by our very thinking nature have "immediate" background structures of his categories? — schopenhauer1

I suppose you could say that. I felt it confused the issue to use “immediate” in that way, because Kant is using it specifically with regard to the perception of things in the world.

The idea that we perceive things "as they are' seems incoherent to me. But that is indeed the naive assumption; that our eyes are like windows through which we look out onto a world of real objects. Naive realists like Banno don't seem to be able to let go of this primal picture. — Janus

I think it’s more that he is reacting to the equally incoherent claim that we don’t perceive things “as they (really) are”.

And thus, I would say, not quite a direct realist — schopenhauer1

Ok, I confess: to describe Kant as a direct realist tout court is an exaggeration. But as Horkheimer said, sometimes only exaggeration is true.

By the way, it’s not immediate access to the categories that we have, but immediate access to things in the world around us.

Yes, he was a transcendental idealist; that’s implicit in what I’ve said already. I’m emphasizing his system in a particular way to bring out what I see is the thrust of his thinking on these matters.

I admit that for Kant, objects of experience are real insofar as they are conditioned by the transcendental conditions of experience. In other words, we experience things that we are able to experience, as we are able to experience them.

It would be wrong to interpret him as saying that we just see things in our heads.

Even Kant supposed a thing in itself — schopenhauer1

An appeal to the supposed authority of Kant will not carry much weight here — Banno

Kant was a direct realist. The external world is the “empirically real” and the tree is an empirical object that we experience “immediately”. See the “Refutation of Idealism”.

here it is proved that outer experience is really immediate — B276

Not that it’s remotely relevant.

It is immaterial in the sense it is not correlated with anything physical and in the sense it is not objectively visible or in a one to one relationship with any particular brain state. — Andrew4Handel

Yes, although I’d put it a little differently just by saying that it is not reducible to physical explanations. But crucially, I wouldn’t say that this irreducibility entails immateriality. In other words, I’m going with some kind of non-reductive materialism.

Individuals do not recognize themselves. They learn to be themselves in interaction with other selves. There is no process of recognizing others as selves, or rather that skill is an integral part of learning to be a self. — Ludwig V

If recognizing others as selves is an integral part of learning to be a self, then isn’t it going too far to say that individuals do not recognize themselves?

Basically though, I don’t think I disagree with anything you’re saying, and my attempted definition could certainly do with some refinement. Note that if I seemed to imply a process, this was more in the way of a kind of mythical history to make the definition clearer, rather than an account of individual self-formation.

my narrative is not constructed. It is lived. Afterwards, narratives may be constructed. — Ludwig V

I’m not sure I understand this. Stories are not lived, they are told. Life is what is lived, and this life becomes a narrative (but again, I’m not implying temporal stages here) in the representation an individual has of itself, i.e., the self.

Once again, I doubt we differ much here.

I can't even imagine wanting to try. — Vera Mont

I'm not sure why you think anyone is interested in the fact that you are not interested in Hegel, in a discussion specifically about Hegel. There are other discussions that you might find more edifying.

You’re welcome. We are here to extend your mind.

It was the same with me: I learned about embodied cognition and the ecological account of perception from others more knowledgeable than me on TPF and its progenitor site.

Yeah, and I was trying to cover a lot of things: embodiment, sociality, and the ecological view. I should read Lakoff, keep meaning to.

Look it up.

A clue: when you fly directly from London to Istanbul, it doesn’t mean you don’t have to get on a plane and move through the sky to get there. It means you don’t stop anywhere on the way.

EDIT: if that seemed unnecessarily rude or curt, it’s because you failed to observe the principle of charity, and I found this rather annoying. It should be obvious that direct realists cannot possibly mean what you take them to mean.

1. The transformation from sensory media (light, sound waves, chemicals) into nerve signals.

2: The transformation or interpretation of nerve signals into the abstract, fictive qualities of experience (colors, sounds, smells). — hypericin

There is no version of direct realism that I’m aware of that would deny these. A major type of direct realism is distinguished by its claim that we perceive trees, not representations of trees—not that perception isn’t a transformative process.

That said, while I couldn’t resist making that point, I’ve come to think that this whole debate tends to go wrong from the start, that the direct-indirect dichotomy is unhelpful.

What do you think the self is? How would you define it? — Andrew4Handel

Off the top of my head…

The self is the overarching temporally extended narrative construct of a necessarily embodied and social consciousness which turns the animal acting in an environment into a subject. It is that through which the individual recognizes that it is one of many, i.e., an individual in a society of individuals, which are also selves. The self is that which recognizes itself as a self in a world of selves.*

To refer back to the mention of perception and experience in the OP, I’ll note that by “the animal acting” in the last paragraph I mean the animal that perceives and experiences according to its (minimally) biologically-motivated behaviour in its environment. So ultimately I’m telling a story that calls attention to (but does not explain) the difference between animal agency and selfhood, but which emphasizes the importance of the environment for both.

I don’t think it’s “immaterial”, but I don’t think it’s all about the brain, though having a brain is no doubt helpful.

* It’s Friday and I’ve had a couple of glasses of wine, so I won’t mind too much if someone tells me this sentence is gibberish

:up:

Maybe after you're through with Marx — frank

One cannot be through with Marx until human emancipation is achieved. :grin:

The way I put it is that numbers are real, but they're not existent in the sense that phenomenal objects are existent, but mainstream thought can't accomodate this distinction because there is no conceptual category for intelligible objects, in the Platonic sense. — Wayfarer

You may have answered this earlier in the discussion, but my obvious question is: what do you mean by real? If you take a Kantian view of the matter, mathematical objects are universal, necessary, and objective. All good so far. But at the same time, this objectivity for Kant is possible only via the subject of experience, by means of the faculties of understanding and intuition. Rather than full-on objectivity, this might be closer to intersubjectivity, in that it's only objective within the realm of human subjects.

Doesn't this almost look more like mathematical psychologism than platonism? The latter would demand that mathematical objects are entirely independent of human minds, and Kant is not quite able to say that, no matter how much he'd like to.

So, do we bite the platonic bullet and assert that Kant underestimated the realness of mathematical objects, or do we retreat to the Kantian middle-ground?

I had a thought while reading this. Which is that perhaps Hegel's approach is to overcome opposition without losing the vitality of opposition. It would be contrary to the critical method to allow oppositions to stand without being overcome but the life of Hegel's system comes from the power of the negative so some element of opposition must remain. — Toby Determined

Speaking as someone who has only read Hegel’s Philosophy of History and a bunch of Hegelian thinkers like Marx, Zizek, and Adorno (and not much of the latter two), I don’t have the authority to answer this. However, what you say looks right. Overcoming is not just a dissolution of the contradiction but its preservation. I believe this is what Hegel calls sublation.

We don’t have many Hegel experts here, but @Tobias might be able to help.

Yeah that’s on my list too. :grin:

Dialectic of Enlightenment by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno — Jamal

Finished it. Pessimistic but also utopian, outrageous but also convincing, obscure but also polemical, bitter but also humane, anti-enlightenment but also pro-enlightenment. Dialectical thinking is addictive and I'm seeking contradictions everywhere. Adorno believed that the dialectic couldn't be set out theoretically, only shown in practice; I think this work is a good exemplar.

One of the keys to appreciating the work comes in the third chapter:

only exaggeration is true

It turns out that this was probably written by Horkheimer, not Adorno, and I appreciated it, because it showed me how to understand the whole book.

Generally, it's really interesting to compare the styles and approaches of the two authors. It seems that while the chapters "The Concept of Enlightenment" and "The Culture Industry" were 50/50, the chapter on Odysseus was mostly written by Adorno, the chapter on Juliette almost entirely by Horkheimer. Horkheimer is the clearer writer and seems to build arguments more explicitly, while at the same time is more brutal, caustic, and pessimistic. He is motivated by love and despair for humanity. Adorno is all over the place but is more playful and even sometimes mystical. He is motivated by love and despair for the fading Western tradition of literature, music, and philosophy.

As aficionados will notice from what I've just written, I've begun to mimic their style. It's like the first time I saw The Karate Kid only more Hegelian.

I won't say more because I want to start a discussion about it, but I'm not sure how to go about it yet.

I now have a rabbit hole of supplementary reading — Jamal

I'm even seriously considering reading Hegel.

In a good way :grin:

You’re in your own special category.

I suppose I could try doing the same and see what happens. How do you do it again? :lol:

What's up with that? Any solutions? — T Clark

That image shows ok on mobile for me and I don’t recall having trouble viewing images. I don’t know why your mobile browser wouldn’t show it. So … I can’t think how you could solve it.

A few questions to think about or confirm if you haven’t already:

1. Are you sure it happens to different images and not just your notorious thumb pic?
2. Are you sure it’s only when you link to one of your uploads?
3. Does the problem ever resolve itself or does the problem image forever remain broken on mobile?

I wouldn’t dream of making such an outrageous claim.

Agreed. So here’s my version.

Canonicals (includes some Anglos and many continentals, as well as those who are neither. Focused on or knowledgeable in the tradition, well-read in the great works going back to Plato)

Analytics

Contrarians

Sciencey dabblers

Politicos

Woomongers :wink:

Yep, seems useful, although you might find that each person has their own taxonomy reflecting their prejudices, which becomes reinforcing when made explicit.

Another point: when I first saw the term “canonicals” I was expecting it to be the people who are into Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Kant, etc. So-called continentals are as steeped in that tradition as the Anglos, so splitting them up in the way you’ve done has its problems.

Cool.

At various times I think I’ve been in all of those categories except “original sythesizers”.

“Continentals” should probably also include critical theory and Marxism. Come to think of it, they could come under counterculturals as well. Come to think of it more, I’m guessing that American-style libertarians and anti-woke folk think of themselves as countercultural too.

But then the countercultural category begins to look strained. Maybe “politicals” could be added.

My main problem is that your definition of the countercultural type doesn’t imply anything actually countercultural, unless you just want to restrict it to secularism-sceptical spiritual seekers or something like that.

Despite all that, apparently Adorno was a big fan of the TV show Daktari, starring Clarence the cross-eyed lion.

Cool!

I just occasionally hear bits and pieces of hers and haven’t taken a deep dive.

Dialectic of Enlightenment by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno — Jamal

My attitude going into this was that I wanted a brief palate-cleanser between heavy works of fiction, which could also neatly fill a gap in my philosophical knowledge. What a fool! I was forgetting that philosophy is quite hard.

The upshot is that I’m still on the first essay, “The Concept of Enlightenment,” reading it repeatedly and more slowly each time, and I now have a rabbit hole of supplementary reading, including Horkheimer’s Eclipse of Reason and Marcuse’s Reason and Revolution, among lots of other material.

It’s great though, otherwise I wouldn’t continue.

I wasn't questioning your decision to review the book, only pointing out a difference in our approach — T Clark

I know. I was describing my own approach in your terms.

I rarely write negative things about books. There are so many wonderful books out there and I want to point them out to people. — T Clark

By the same token, in writing a bad review I’m providing a service. I’m saying, it’s ok not to read this, try something wonderful instead.

The main thing is though, I find I can’t write anything interesting about books I love, or I just don’t feel motivated to do so. I seem to need some friction, something to get worked up about. Anger is an energy. In the case of Crash I was close to throwing the book across the room a few times (until I remembered I was reading on an iPad).

Very much in the shadow of WWII and the Cold War. Walter Benjamin, who was an esteemed member of their circle, had been forced to suicide on pain of being captured by the Wehrmacht, apart from all the other massive destruction that had befallen everything around them — Wayfarer

Yes, their outrage about it leaps off the page.

Kind of the same with me: I’ve only read about it and read bits of it before. So far it’s quite angry and declamatory.

I kept on reading for three reasons: (1) the absurd perversity was quite funny and I was curious how far it would go, (2) I wanted to write something about it and couldn’t do that in good conscience without reading the whole thing, and (3) I suppose it was compelling or mesmerizing enough to draw me back in (I did actually abandon it one evening, but returned to it the next day).